Rapture: The Depths

by Lucie Thésée

The one-eyed sky: the moon-sky, its light on the tiles of the ruined plantation veranda. And she who comes here often, that black woman, long-boned, slender — long bones stretched on a bed rigged out of scraps and village legends.

Long bones, slight — and chestnut-bronze and unadorned, her skin; her clothes a muslin filigree. Darkness in the dark skirt’s folds, her cat mewls for that dead man’s face, the moon: Long Bones knows the face it sees.

Long Bones runs long fingers through the cat-fur, forehead first, against the grain, suffers the cat-eyed gaze a while. A brief shrug, a flexion of the neck and shoulders. “He wouldn’t take me, he said ‘you are afraid,’ he lit his cigarette…”

Darkness in the Dark is not surprised, would suffer her fingers in his fur some more. But Long Bones paces in the light of the one-eyed sky, veranda-length, veranda-length again, to pause, as if to wait for someone, as if to hope. Late, and yet late. If anyone saw, no one would ask: isn’t it Long Bones, dark in dark? No one would ask. She comes here often. Day will find her. No one else.